SciTechCourse

Enduring Understandings

Top

S8.D.2.1 Explain how pressure, temperature, moisture, and wind are used to describe atmospheric conditions that affect regional weather or climate.

S8.D.2.1.1 Explain the impact of water systems on the local weather or the climate of a region (e.g., lake effect snow, land/ocean breezes).
S8.D.2.1.2 Identify how global patterns of atmospheric movement influence regional weather and climate.
S8.D.2.1.3 Identify how cloud types, wind directions, and barometric pressure changes are associated with weather patterns in different regions of the country.

S8.B.3.2 Identify evidence of change to infer and explain the ways different variables may affect change in natural or human-made systems.

S8.B.3.2.1 Use evidence to explain factors that affect changes in populations (e.g., deforestation, disease, land use, natural disaster, invasive species).
S8.B.3.2.2 Use evidence to explain how diversity affects the ecological integrity of natural systems.
S8.B.3.2.3 Describe the response of organisms to environmental changes (e.g., changes in climate, hibernation, migration, coloration) and how those changes affect survival.

S8.D.1.1 Describe constructive and destructive natural processes that form different geologic structures and resources.

S8.D.1.1.1 Explain the rock cycle as changes in the solid earth and rock types found in Pennsylvania (igneous – granite, basalt, obsidian, pumice; sedimentary – limestone, sandstone, shale, coal; and metamorphic – slate, quartzite, marble, gneiss).
S8.D.1.1.2 Describe natural processes that change Earth’s surface (e.g., landslides, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, mountain building, new land being formed, weathering, erosion, sedimentation, soil formation).
S8.D.1.1.3 Identify soil types (i.e., humus, topsoil, subsoil, loam, loess, and parent material) and their characteristics (i.e., particle size, porosity, and permeability) found in different biomes and in Pennsylvania, and explain how they formed.
S8.D.1.1.4 Explain how fossils provide evidence about plants and animals that once lived throughout Pennsylvania’s history (e.g., fossils provide evidence of different environments).

Top

Explain the effects of heat, density, topography, and seasons on weather patterns.
Interpret and analyze weather maps to predict weather patterns.
Explain the processes that take place at plate boundaries and how these processes continue to shape Earth.
Analyze features caused by the interaction of processes that change Earth’s surface and environment.
Analyze how tools are used to predict and monitor the changing Earth's surface.

Top

Top

Top

Top